Unusual colour problem?
I'll let the pictures do the talking.
What it looks like on my Mac:
What it looks like on my iPhone:
Notice almost like the sudden gradient effect that appears out of no where? Any ideas to why this is happening? It may not be THAT visible on this thread, but trust me playing it from the device, instantly noticeable.
What it looks like on my Mac:
What it looks like on my iPhone:
Notice almost like the sudden gradient effect that appears out of no where? Any ideas to why this is happening? It may not be THAT visible on this thread, but trust me playing it from the device, instantly noticeable.
Comments
On Mac:
On iPhone:
look at the background, mainly the darker areas, notice how its no longer smooth, looks like a deliberate gradient effect
Like John said - it's just banding - without knowing the details of the process you used I can't say for sure what introduced the banding . . . but (again like John said) adding a little bit of noise to diffuse the banded areas helps . . . .
. . . but, of course, your image will look grainy rather than smooth and - importantly - your file size will greatly increase - as a rough guide I would say you should assume adding noise will increase the file size *at least* by 150% - 200% with busy complex images - and as much as 1000% (yes 10 times as large !) will simpler/more 'graphic' images.
You probably don't want to know the details, but put simply noisy images are much harder to compress (even with lossless formats like PNG).
Ace
"without knowing the details of the process you used I can't say for sure what introduced the banding"
does this help? (edited in photoshop)
image size 960x640
DPI: 72
color model: RGB
PNG-24 format
depth: 8
interlace type: 0
quality: bicubic
so theres no solution to this except for adding in grain/noise? obviously i would prefer it to look smooth, and the increase in file size doesnt sound appealing either!
Add grain until just before it's visible and should help.
Ace
Well, there are solutions, but they are all, necessarily by definition, compromises.
One solution would be to make the steps in your gradient finer or make the contrast between the darkest shade and the lightest shade more pronounced.
Look at it like this, imagine we only have 8 colours to play with (let's assume 8 levels of grey - from pure black to pure white)
Now imagine we make a box that is 8 pixels wide - and place our gradient across that box - each of the 8 colours will cover a single pixel - the gradient will look smooth.
Now lets try the same thing with a box that is 165 pixels wide - again we place our gradient across the box - but due to the extra resolution - each shade in our palette of eight tones needs to cover 20.625 pixels = the result is 'banding' - each shade covers a band of pixels.
Now back to the idea of making the contrast between the darkest shade and the lightest shade more pronounced . . .
If we have an area to cover (let's say 256 pixels wide this time) and our palette of colours is limited to 256 shades of grey - you will get a pretty smooth gradient if we place our gradient across this 256 pixel wide box - as each tone (of the 256) will cover 1 pixel. But that is going from pure black to pure white.
If we were to go from . . say 33% grey to 66% grey we are effectively reducing out pallet to 85 shades of grey - and with only 85 shades of grey across a 256 pixel wide box we will start to see banding (each tone (of the 85) will cover 3 pixels.
So to decrease banding we can increase the range of the tones used to cover an area (ie: pure black to pure white will always band less than - for instance - mid grey to dark grey - (given the same bit depth)).
So, increase the contrast between your gradient's two extremes (to maximise the tones available to build the gradient) - make sure 'dither' is switch on if doing this in Photoshop and then add a little noise to troublesome areas.
I've never tried what @Tynan said, but all looks like stellar information. I've always just added a little noise and things have sorted themselves out
Mario managed to get away with it, so we can
Ace
Ace
Ace
Fantastic piece of information to have !!
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Thanks for sharing the info.
*edit* Should this be moved over to graphics?
I will say that banding is not always a bad thing depending on the visual message you are trying to convey, just like with games that use simplistic geometry in their design (think Katamari Damacy and Gregory Horror House), sometimes it can work in your favor.
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